Original Article via International Herald Tribune:
Starting sometime next summer, if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 27-kilometer, or 17-mile, underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, into France and back again.
Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.
Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then – relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago – will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the movie “Groundhog Day.” If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory.
New York Times article